When hosting a large web conference meeting or other online communication session with many participants, particularly meetings involving video content, the data streams can utilize significant bandwidth for an enterprise such as a corporation or organization. Certain techniques are known for reducing bandwidth usage for transmission of data streams to multiple end points or nodes, such as peer-to-peer (P2P), cascading and multicasting. However, these techniques can present certain issues.
For example, when utilizing P2P and cascading techniques, network latency issues may be introduced due to the multiple level tree structure in which data streams are passed between nodes. This often renders P2P and cascading unsuitable for real time communications.
Multicasting by a host media server from the cloud (e.g., via the internet or a remote network) to a network for an enterprise during a web meeting can also present problems. This is due to the fact that, for security reasons, most enterprises typically prevent or block any multicast data stream coming from an outside source via the internet from passing through the firewall of the enterprise network.